When I first got my Fujifilm GFX50R, at about the same time I got the 45mm and the 120mm macro lenses, but I hesitated over the 23mm lens, one because of it’s cost, but also because I was not sure how much use I would have for for such a wide lens (18mm equivalent).
I hired a 23mm for about 6 weeks from Hireacamera, and this convinced me that this focal length was very useful to me on MF, especially when using the 65:24 (aka ‘XPan’) crop on the camera, and that the lens was of exceptional quality (although I did have a faulty copy that was exchanged - but then hire kit does tend to have a hard life).
Fujfilm GF 23mm on GFX50R in 65:24 ‘Xpan’ mode
However, with the price of the lens having risen back to it’s list price and all discounts seeming to have disappeared, plus my opportunities to use it being very limited, I decided to look at alternates. There was also in the back of my mind that Fujifilm were planning to release a 30mm lens during 2020, and this might be a better fit for me as well as being potentially much cheaper.
I had an on-going project that would definately benefit from the wider lens though, and long story short, I ended up buying a Samyang 24mm f/3.5 tilt-shift lens in Nikon F fit, and a Gobe mount adapter. To put this in context, I could have bought four Samyang lenses and the mount adapter for about the same price as the Fujifilm lens. Of course, there are some notable compromises:
Manual focus (not really an issue for landscapes)
Inferior image quality at large apertures (not really an issue for landscapes)
Stop-down metering (not really an issue for landscapes)
Plasticky build, when compared to the native GFX lenses
Mount adapter introduces another complication/variable
Size - it’s a little longer than the 23mm, even before you add the mount adapter
On the up side though, the Samyang does have some positives:
Potential to use a limited amount of tilt and shift
Rotating mount and rotating tilt section means tilt and shift axis are independent
By most accounts, very good image quality when stopped down to f/8 - f/11
Can be easily adapted to use on my Fujifilm X cameras as well
As mentioned, I find this focal length really useful in the ‘XPan’ mode on the GFX. It’s roughly equivalent to a 90mm lens on a 6x17 panoramic film camera (incidently the GF 45mm similarly equates to 180mm on 617).
I hoped I would have the ability to add up to a degree of tilt (all that is usually needed for landscapes), which would make getting the whole image sharp from front-to-back easy. I previously used PC-E lenses on Nikon full frame and cropped-sensor DSLRs, but I did find them very tricky to adjust and wanted to see how easy tilt/shift lenses would be to use with the GFX’s electronic manual focus aids.
Tilt-shift lenses have an image circle that exceeds the size of the film or sensor they are intended to be used with. This is to allow for the shifting of the image, but as the Samyang is intended for use with 35x24mm film, not a 44x33mm sensor, the results would be a bit of an unknown quantity.
I’ll be following this up with a further post once I have had a bit of time to evaluate the Samyang lens on GFX.
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